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PROTOCOL 01
彼岸花 · PROTOCOL 01
PROTOCOL 01
speculative instrument · interaction / product / behavioral design
Every dinner at the family’s table ends the same way. The plates are cleared, the conversation has looped twice, everyone is tired, and still nobody stands up. We all know it is over. Nobody wants to be the one to say so. There is always a vase in the middle of the table. It just sits there.
… I started wondering what would happen if it didn’t.
A growing collection of machines for social situations nobody wants to manage.

Every meeting has a moment when it is quietly over. Everyone in the room knows the meeting was scheduled for forty-five minutes. Everyone can see the clock. And still it continues, because no one has a socially acceptable way to say the thing everyone is thinking. The rule exists. The mechanism to enforce it does not. So I build an instrument that gives the unspoken agreement a body, and let the object be the one to say something.

We live inside countless invisible systems: time, politeness, queuing, personal space, attention, reciprocity, silence, turn-taking, departure. What happens when invisible social rules acquire physical form? Can an interface model social tolerance, or encode social norms? What should technology make visible?

It starts as a clock. Then it becomes a problem.
彼岸花 · higanbana

Where the object gets its manners.

PROTOCOL takes its form and its temperament from the red spider lily, known in Japan as higanbana, the flower of the equinox and the other shore. It blooms in autumn on a bare, leafless stalk, and its leaves arrive only once the flowering is finished, so the plant is defined by two states cursed never to share the stage.

It grows along graveyard paths and the edges of rice fields, planted there because it is poisonous, a quiet guardian of boundaries. It is the flower of final goodbyes, said to line the path souls take out of this world. An object that presides over the end of an agreement could not ask for a better ancestor.

The flower and the leaf never meet, the same way a meeting’s promise and its reality never quite coincide. PROTOCOL sits in that gap.

The centerpiece borrows three things from the flower: a bloom that means an ending has arrived, a body that guards a threshold, and the unsettling elegance of a beautiful thing that appears exactly when something is over. Its long, spider-leg stamens and recurved petals become the brand’s emblem.

instrument

Program a meeting, then watch it refuse to end.

Set the promise, the tolerance, the number of witnesses, the body and the awareness. Then seal the agreement and let the clock run.

PROTOCOL · 01configuration

Make the meeting end on time.

the question it raises
meeting
promise · 45 min
the length everyone agreed to
witnesses · 8
more witnesses, less patience
tolerance · 5 min
the overrun you will forgive
body
control through growth. it asks where it can grow.
awareness
it knows it is in the room, and it has opinions.

Try the bureaucratic body. It files paperwork on you.

behaviour

The flat line before the break is the whole design.

For the promised time, and a little grace, it does almost nothing. It could be a sculpture. Then it moves. How fast depends on how many people are waiting: two of you barely registers, a full room turns five minutes into a thicket.

0153045607545:00it takes the roompresenceminutes at the table

The waiting is the joke, and the threat. Anticipation does the work.

CONTRACT
we agreed
GRACE
it’s fine
CONCERN
someone noticed
INTERVENTION
say something
VIOLATION
you said 45 minutes
system

How a rule becomes a thing in the room.

You set a meeting’s promise, tolerance, number of witnesses, and temperament. The system turns those terms into presence: a measure of how difficult the object should be to ignore. For the first 45 minutes, almost nothing happens. Then it starts to compute. A projection grows across a real object. A servo begins to move. The longer the meeting runs, the more the object occupies the room. Not an alarm. Not a reminder. A computational design body that sits there, does fun(ny) stuff, and makes the agreement visible.

AGREEMENT→TIME→BEHAVIOUR→CONSEQUENCE

The prototype is the brain of the object. The spatial body was computed with math in TouchDesigner. The 3D projection and installation of the software places the agreement on the table.

Signal chain
01
You
set the terms
INPUT
↓type the intent
02
Web console
the PROTOCOL screen
INTERFACE
↓WebSocket / OSC
03
Timer + phases
turns terms into presence
LOGIC
↓presence
04
TouchDesigner
grows it, maps it to the object
ENGINE
the signal splits
↓video
05
Projector
light on the vase
OUTPUT
↓serial
05
ESP32
microcontroller
DRIVER
↓PWM
06
Servo
movement
MOTION
↓light and motion meet on the object
07
The vase
grows, leans, and blooms
OBJECT
body

Three bodies. One problem.

The same lateness, read three ways.

Grow it. Document it. Block the room.

Not three styles of one object. Three different ways for technology to make itself difficult to ignore.

Botanical control through growth
It grows. It asks where it can grow, then does, until the room is colonised by its own inability to end.
Bureaucratic control through administration
It files paperwork on you. Notice, reminder, second notice, form 01-B, escalation, case opened.
Architectural control through obstruction
It starts taking your chair. It asks what space is left, then takes it, until the meeting cannot continue.
voice

It stays polite far longer than the situation warrants.

Give it the self-aware body and it talks. At first, it is helpful. As the meeting runs on, it becomes more direct. The language follows the rules of etiquette. It will never tell you to stop. It will politely remind you of the agreement, suggest that it might be time to finish, and eventually decide that enough is enough. The machine is simply keeping the promise everyone made at the beginning.

The language has been tested across meetings, dinners, coffee dates, client conversations, job interviews, and consultations. It does not need to know what kind of encounter it is in. It only needs to know:

an agreement existed→time has passed→humans have not concluded→intervention escalates
00:00“Welcome. We have time.”
44:59“Everything is proceeding as agreed.”
45:01“Noted.”
+03“No immediate cause for concern.”
+08“Might I suggest we begin to draw things to a close?”
+11“I believe we have reached a natural conclusion.”
+14“We had agreed on forty-five minutes.”
+18“I have taken the liberty of noting the additional time.”
+23“I am afraid I must intervene.”
“Thank you. That will be all.”
awareness

Who knows?

Consent. Everyone knows it is here.
Host. Only you configured it; the room discovers it.
Secret. No one knows; it simply begins.
Self-aware. It knows, and it has opinions.

ethics

Making a rule visible, or making it unavoidable.

It starts as a productivity object and quietly turns into a question about control.

When does assistance become coercion?

I don’t know. That’s partly why I built it.

decisions

What I considered, and why I chose.

The brand
consideredHanging it on a real company.
choseA made-up one, PROTOCOL.
whyA fictional brand lets the object be a whole category, not an advertisement, and leaves room for a series.
Which rule first
consideredThe dinner guest, the queue, the meeting.
choseThe meeting.
whyIt is the only one with an agreed end time, so the whole piece can live in the gap between the clock and the room.
What drives it
consideredA four-way formula: overrun times people times mood times tolerance.
choseOne presence curve, bent by how many people are waiting.
whyThe formula was unstable and needed a mood input I never had. The curve keeps the intent and stays tunable.
Temperament
consideredA slider that made it more dramatic.
choseNo slider.
whyDrama you can dial is decoration. How intense it gets should come from how late it is and how many people are stuck there.
The last word
consideredRenaming VIOLATION to something grander.
choseKeeping VIOLATION, and putting the attitude in the voice.
whyA silent object should not editorialise. Only the talking one earns the right to say the last word.
The words
consideredA dashboard: duration, headcount, grace.
choseAn instrument: promise, tolerance, witnesses, body, awareness.
whyIt should feel like programming a strange organism, not filling a form.
The bodies
consideredThree visual styles.
choseThree theories of control.
whyGrowth, administration, obstruction. Three looks is decoration; three arguments is a project.
The projection
consideredA hologram floating in mid-air.
choseProjection mapped onto a real object.
whyAchievable, and prettier. The object stays literal while the metaphor grows on its skin.
The body
consideredA pretty animation that grows with the clock.
choseA system that tries to occupy the room, grown in TouchDesigner.
whyTime should not set size, it should raise the odds of behaviour. This prototype is the brain. The body gets grown for real.
Time
consideredMaking you wait 45 minutes to see anything.
choseA compressed preview, with a real-time setting for the patient.
whyThe installation runs in real time. The portfolio does not.
The look
consideredBright and cheerful.
choseDeep burgundy, bone, one scarlet, painted not printed.
whyCheerful fought the idea. The flower set the register: a little funereal. And a serif makes the object’s last line a whisper, not a punchline.
The flower
consideredA generic growing thing.
choseA red spider lily, the higanbana.
whyA flower for thresholds, endings, and final goodbyes. It seemed appropriate. ;-)
PROTOCOL
Objects for the things we don't know how to say.
Roadmap: control through surveillance · politeness · embarrassment · authority. A collection of machines for enforcing the little rules we pretend aren't rules.

The Affective Index


A living archive of internal states to explore, observe, and reflect upon. The Affective Index is an ongoing typographic research project exploring emotional states, transitions, and psychological thresholds through color, form, and systems design.




Overview

The Affective Index is a self-initiated research project examining how typography and color systems can illustrate, structure, and articulate internal human states. Rather than treating emotion as decoration or narrative, the project approaches affect as a design system that can be cataloged, constrained, repeated, and studied. The work lives primarily as a series of posters and printed matter, designed to scale into calendars, editorial spreads, and exhibitions.
Intent & Questions

In digital and brand environments, emotion is often referenced implicitly but rarely designed with rigor. How can typography carry emotional meaning without imagery?
What does it look like to design feelings as systems rather than moments? How can internal states be made legible, repeatable, and spatial?
   The Affective Index positions emotional experience as something that can be designed, measured, and structured, without losing complexity.
Methodology & Design System

The project operates under a shared system across all volumes:
  1. one word per poster
  2. typography and color only (no imagery)
  3. modular grid systems
  4. strict constraints with expressive variation
  5. emotional meaning conveyed through:
  6. typographic width, weight, spacing, and alignment
  7. color logic governed by rules
    (not aesthetics)
  8. each volume introduces its own internal logic while remaining part of a cohesive visual language
















Volumes

Volume I: Feeling (2025)

Emotional States
This volume focuses on discrete, nameable emotional conditions (states one can “be in”). Color operates as a field of emotional intensity, with one dominant color per poster. Typography is expressive, scaled, and emotionally responsive, allowing form to expand, compress, or breathe.
Examples include:
Anticipation, Tension, Ease, Delight, Overwhelm, Yearning, Relief, Ambivalence

Volume II: Thresholds (In Progress, 2026)

Transitions & Edges
Thresholds are not emotions, but moments of change (crossings, pauses, and decisions).
In this volume, color becomes directional and interrupted, often split into two fields. Typography interacts with boundaries, margins, and seams, emphasizing movement, friction, and passage.
Examples include: Arrival, Crossing, Exposure, Repair, Resolve, Release, Becoming

Volume III: Duration (Coming Soon, 2027)

Time-Based States
Duration explores experiences defined by persistence, repetition, and time rather than intensity.
Color systems repeat or shift serially. Typography follows consistent rules across multiple posters, emphasizing accumulation, erosion, endurance, and aftermath.
Examples include: Holding, Drift, Accumulation, Repetition, Latency, Endurance

Outcomes


– a modular poster system designed for print, calendar formats, and editorial use
– a flexible framework for future volumes and research
– a body of work demonstrating typographic discipline, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence


Why This Project Matters


The Affective Index sits at the intersection of branding, editorial design, and cultural research. It reflects my broader design approach for treating design as both ecosystem and experience, building systems that scale without losing humanity using constraint as a tool for clarity and meaning. This project functions as both visual archive and an ongoing inquiry ... a living index of how internal states can be shaped through design.

Impressions — one machine, different ways of seeing

Impressions · a generative print system for retail

One machine. Different ways of seeing.

The machine does not have a fixed visual language. It has a fixed way of making decisions. One engine reduces a transaction to a seed and prints two inks slightly out of register. On top sits a Brand Grammar: what the brand notices, how it speaks, how it composes, how it prints, what it keeps. Change the grammar and the machine does not just change color. It changes its mind.

01   The architecture

A brain, not a style.

Two layers. The engine stays constant across every brand. The grammar is the part each brand supplies, and it is where the whole idea lives.

The engine

constant — the same for everyone

  1. receive the transaction
  2. normalize the data
  3. seed a deterministic decision
  4. select from a vocabulary
  5. place by rules
  6. print, edition, archive

The brand grammar

variable — supplied by each brand

  1. what it notices  ·  inputs
  2. what it says  ·  marks
  3. how it thinks  ·  mappings
  4. how it composes  ·  layout
  5. how it prints  ·  behavior
  6. how it remembers  ·  archive

02   The proof

Four brands, four grammars.

The same engine wearing four grammars, each running live. Tap any card and it makes its decision again. Nothing is shared here but the seed and the press.

Aesop

It notices the atmosphere.

SKY u00b7 LIGHT u00b7 TIME u00b7 SEASON

Ceremonia

It notices the ritual.

HERITAGE u00b7 WARMTH u00b7 HOUR u00b7 CRAFT

Dieux

It notices the evidence.

FORMULATION u00b7 USAGE u00b7 TRANSPARENCY

Ffern

It notices the season.

EQUINOX u00b7 CYCLE u00b7 BATCH u00b7 HARVEST

Tap a card to reshuffle just that one.

03   The comparison

Same engine. Different worldview.

AesopCeremoniaDieuxFfern
Remembersthe momentthe ritualthe readingthe season
Readssky + timeheritage + hourformulation + usagebotanical cycle
Marksarcs + lensescurls + fruitwings + cherubsmycelium + petals
Composesasymmetricradialexact, registeredorganic
Printssoft driftwarm overprintsilver foil, perfect regvariable density
Keepsthe momentthe ritualthe evidencethe season

04   The demonstration

Same transaction, four minds.

One identical input, handed to all four grammars at once. The data does not change. The interpretation does.

Aesop
Ceremonia
Dieux
Ffern

Cover the names. You can still tell four systems apart. That is the difference between a platform and a filter.